A key prosecution witness against Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes told her judge Monday that although he visited her home months after her fraud conviction — an incident Holmes is seeking to use as grounds for a new trial — he stands by the testimony he gave in her trial.
Holmes is scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 18 on four counts of felony fraud, after a jury in January convicted her of defrauding investors in her now-defunct Palo Alto blood-testing startup out of more than $144 million. Legal experts say Judge Edward Davila will likely hand her a multi-year prison sentence.
Early in her four-month trial, former Theranos lab director Dr. Adam Rosendorff testified for the prosecution that Theranos had “valued PR and fundraising over patient care,” and that he felt “obligated from a moral and ethical perspective to alert the public” about inaccurate test results.
Rosendorff, a key witness for the prosecution, said in a special hearing Monday before Davila in U.S. District Court in San Jose that in the run-up to his August visit to Holmes’ house, he had become “increasingly distressed” at the prospect that her son, just over a year old, would “spend his formative years” without one of his parents if Holmes were in prison.
Rosendorff later told court Monday, “It’s my understanding that Ms. Holmes may be pregnant again,” and expressed concern that “Elizabeth’s children would go without a mother to raise them.” Holmes, asked outside court and inside the courthouse whether she was pregnant, declined to answer. Her partner Billy Evans, who is the father of their son, also declined to answer.
Judges may consider the well-being of children when sentencing parents, legal experts say.
Evans, the only person at Holmes’ residence to speak with Rosendorff that day in August, has said in a memo filed in court that the doctor appeared disheveled, and said he felt “guilty” and “desperate to talk to Elizabeth.” Evans said Rosendorff told him that when testifying against Holmes he “tried to answer the questions honestly but that the prosecutors tried to make everybody (in the company) look bad,” and that the prosecution “made things sound worse than they were when he was up on the stand.” According to Evans, Rosendorff said he wanted to “help” Holmes.
Lawyers for Holmes, 38, said Rosendorff’s visit suggested possible misconduct by federal prosecutors and amounted to new evidence warranting a new trial.
Rosendorff, questioned by Davila and Holmes lawyer Lance Wade on Monday, told Davila that while on the witness stand in Holmes’ trial he testified “truthfully and honestly.” The doctor admitted that when talking to Evans at Holmes’ residence, he had said something to the effect of prosecutors trying to make people at Theranos look bad. But Rosendorff said he meant that the prosecution “was trying to paint an accurate picture of Elizabeth Holmes,” and that, “to the extent that other people looked bad, it was because of their association with Elizabeth.”
Theranos had purported to be able to conduct a full range of blood tests using only a few drops of blood, but the technology never worked as promised and jurors heard damning evidence that Holmes, a Stanford University dropout, affixed pharmaceutical company logos to internal Theranos reports to falsely suggest the firms had validated the technology.
Holmes founded Theranos in 2003, and it went under in 2018, after a 2015 newspaper exposé led to federal investigations and fraud charges against Holmes and Theranos chief operating officer Sunny Balwani, who was convicted separately in July of 12 counts of fraud.
On Monday, Rosendorff told Davila that regarding his testimony in Holmes’ trial, he never felt manipulated or pressured by federal government prosecutors. “At all times the government has encouraged me to tell the truth and nothing but the truth,” Rosendorff said. The doctor said he did not recall telling Evans he thought prosecutors made the situation at Theranos sound worse than it was, and that he did not believe prosecutors did that.
The doctor said he did recall telling Evans he felt it would be “healing” for him to speak with Holmes. But he shot back when pressed by Holmes lawyer Wade about his purported statement to Evans that he wanted to help Holmes.
“I don’t want to help Ms. Holmes,” Rosendorff said. “At this point she needs to pay her debt to society.”
Rosendorff earlier provided a sworn declaration, filed in court, standing by his testimony. Davila had suggested during a video hearing last week that all that needed to be determined through the hearing was whether Rosendorff backed his own testimony.
Davila said Monday he would allow Holmes’ lawyers and federal prosecutors to submit materials concerning Monday’s hearing and Rosendorff’s visit, before making a decision on the motion for a new trial.
